Usability testing assesses how easy it is for a user to get from A to B. That’s to say, if someone is using your application, it should be simple for them to accomplish the action they’re looking to complete.

For example, if you’re using a website to buy a computer, how straightforward is the process from when you land on the website through checkout? Is navigation clear, does the application load quickly enough, do buttons do what they’re supposed to, are informational forms uncomplicated? Additionally, you have to consider visual design elements that can either make or break the user experience.

The usability of a web application embodies this entire user experience, and usability testing evaluates everything from performance and UI/UX to responsive design. It ensures that current and potential customers are happy with your application and will continue to come back.

Usability Testing Methods

While there are many components to consider when thinking about optimum usability, there are a few methods that will give you the best glimpse of your website and how well it functions.

User Testing

User testing requires having real people use your app to see how well it functions from a nonbiased and unfamiliar perspective. You can either recruit family and friends to try using the app or find focus groups that are willing to explore different features and functionalities.

While it should be manageable to find people who are willing to test your application and give feedback, there are also companies who are dedicated to setting up user testing services for you. For example, UserTesting provides videos of real users in your target audience navigating your web or mobile app and sharing their thoughts. In addition, the service provides metrics and written feedback so you can reference a real user analysis as you integrate changes.

No matter whether you seek out your own users or hire a company, watching how real people use and interact with software is highly beneficial to understanding user stories and insights.

Surveying

Getting feedback from users can be just as valuable after they’ve completed their task as during. By implementing customer satisfaction surveys after someone has purchased a project or completed a trial on your website, they can focus on fulfilling their task and evaluate the overall process once it’s finished.

SurveyMonkey is one of the top questionnaire development companies, and they even supply questions and templates specifically for website feedback. Rather than only looking at whether or not a user converted to a customer, finding out why they did not can help you target pain points and make improvements.

As customer support begins to take the forefront of successful business models, being able to address feedback straight from the source is invaluable. By actually listening to what users have to say about what they’re looking for in something and what it’s lacking, you can make changes that in turn will elicit customer loyalty and create a product they’re more likely to advocate for.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is where you share two versions of one product (version A and version B) to see which one performs better. These changes can be complete website redesigns or something as minimal as a button saying “Click here” v.s. “Sign up” or changing it between red and green. Almost anything can be A/B tested to find out what engages the most customers.

Using analytics, you then compare which one users had a better experience with. This can be based on the time on page, bounce rate, or most commonly, conversion rate. Additionally, you can also request customer feedback asking why users preferred one version over the other.

Similar to user testing and customer surveys, there are companies you can use for complete A/B testing such as Optimizely. By showing half of you traffic the original web page design and half the modified design and then analyzing responses through a statistical engine, Optimizely helps you make data-informed decisions about your web page to determine what the end-user prefers. Ultimately, A/B testing helps you make changes that contribute to the best version of your app.

Leave it to the Experts

While the recent testing trends have been revolving around automation, there’s still a critical place for manual testing, especially when it comes to usability.

Software testers are able to look at an app from different perspectives, handle it as a user would, and test its limits. While real user testing is undoubtedly beneficial to complement the work of a professional software tester, there’s no replacing their position when it comes to determining quality. Since they’re trained and knowledgeable about the way software works and removed from the development process, they’re in the best position to make decisions about what an application may need from a more technical perspective.

Manual testers are particularly skilled in this area and also have valuable proficiency with tools like CrossBrowserTesting screenshots to compare a website across different browsers and devices. Meanwhile, testers that are familiar with automation techniques can also prove their worth when it comes to usability testing as they know how to leverage a different set of tools, such as Selenium, which can be used to automate tests across different browsers and devices.

Having somebody that’s able to perform more complicated tasks like cross-browser testing to ensure that a website works for any user on any device means that you’re always addressing end-to-end usability without leaving any gaps in quality.

Conclusion

Usability testing is important because, often times, when developers and designers are working on a web application, it’s hard to remove themselves when testing and leave behind their pre-disposed knowledge of how it works to think as an end-user.

Recruiting real users, leveraging data, and employing software testers will give your website the competitive edge it needs in usability whether it’s a new page or a new iteration.

After Ministry of Testing featured the 30 Days of Accessibility Testing Challenge, we wanted to take the opportunity to further examine what it means to make your website or application accessible in today’s digital landscape.

At CrossBrowserTesting, we believe that software and design should be of the highest quality no matter what browser or device you’re on. But even more than that, we also know that the best software is optimized for every audience and every potential user.

When the smallest details such as the shade of blue in a link can affect how well someone can view your content, it goes to say that these elements suddenly become crucial to creating an equal user experience.

Keep reading to learn more about how tech organizations are focusing on accessibility testing and how you can similarly develop more accessible software.

Each one of these features has in mind a different disability or assistive technology that had not been supported previously.

“The attitude we’re adopting at Slack is that building an accessible product makes for a better product overall,” said Slack Accessibility Product Manager George Zamfir.

“When you consider how different the user experience is for a blind person using a screen reader or a person with limited fine motor skills who relies on their keyboard to navigate, it quickly becomes clear that addressing accessibility needs can’t be left to the end of the product development cycle, they have to be factored in from the beginning.”

When talking about making accessibility a part of the culture, Zamfir suggests that providing training for people that are invested in the idea of accessibility testing helps them become “champions” for the cause, and in turn, they advocate the practice throughout their teams.

By communicating the value that fostering accessibility in those products brings to the organization as a whole, people in any role from design and QA to customer experience can contribute to the overall quality of service Slack provides for differently abled people.

Best Practices in Salesforce Accessibility Testing

Salesforce is another top company that not only adheres to accessibility guidelines and standards but goes above-and-beyond to make their platform valuable to everyone.

“[Disability] can include people who are blind, color blind, or have low vision, those who are Deaf or have hearing difficulties, people with mobility impairments which may be temporary or permanent, or people with cognitive disabilities,” said Principal Accessibility Specialist Jesse Hausler.

When considering which audience to design for, Hausler makes it apparent that making a universal product is the only acceptable solution. “Design for people who are young, old, power users, casual users, and those who just enjoy a quality experience,” he said.

A few things he says designers can keep in mind when thinking about accessibility testing include making sure there’s enough contrast between text and background, not solely relying on color to convey information, defining and labeling form fields, optimizing menus and autocorrect, attributing images, and making links more visible.

Shopify Self-Reflects On Its Mission

Shopify has also shared how they make an effort to establish accessibility testing.

“At Shopify, our mission is to make commerce better for everyone. […] To us, a quality web product means a few things: certainly beautiful design, engaging copy, and a fantastic user experience, but just as important are inclusivity and the principles of universal design,” said Shopify Front End Development Lead David Newton.

“We take our mission to heart, so it’s important that Shopify products are usable and useful to all our users.”

Instead of creating an “Accessibility Team” they instead focused on creating a more inclusive and accessible culture and implementing new processes into already established product teams. Additionally, a large component of this culture shift was dispelling the myth that accessibility meant lacking function or design.

Shopify acknowledged that making things more accessible was certainly a challenge since it wasn’t something they regularly thought about before. However, just by making some small changes like writing more semantic HTML, applying closed captioning, or just documenting common accessibility requirements, they were able to outline clear expectations for developer and designers, while making the organization more accessible to a larger audience.

Additionally, as designers became more accustomed to including accessibility testing, it also made them better designers as they were more intuitive to the details that go into creating a great user experience.

Including Accessibility in Your Testing

With numerous disabilities come numerous assistive technologies; from screen readers to modified keyboards, accessing a website through these various methods is going to create a different user experience for each person.

When one front-end developer points out that testing your website with every assistive technology would be the equivalent to testing your product with every device, browser, and operating system, we can relate to this manual tediousness at CrossBrowserTesting and don’t recommend going to this extent.

However, as we’ve discussed, there are many simple fixes, new methods, and tools that you can implement into your website to help your site design be more universal, while also making your team into better developers and your product of higher quality.

Which companies have you noticed are making strides in accessibility? Tell us about them in the comments!

It’s not often you stumble upon a service where you’re willing to pay a professional to work while intoxicated. In fact, getting drunk on the job is usually frowned upon. But when Richard Littauer founded The User is Drunk, he seemed to have found just the right niche where this was not only found acceptable, but people were willing to pay a little extra for it.

Operating under the tagline “Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it.” Littauer’s homegrown side-hustle took off as designers and businesses invested in a UX pro that would review their sites with honest commentary and a new perspective.

At CrossBrowserTesting, we believe web design should be optimized for every user, no matter what browser, device, or operating system. Littauer’s project suggests that it’s important to consider the universal user in another way — drunk or sober.

Though Littauer no longer regularly drunk reviews websites (for money, anyway), he still remains opinionated on what separates a good web design from a bad one. In order to answer some of our burning questions, Littauer gave us an exclusive on some of the things he learned and experienced while testing under the influence.

What’s your background in development and UI/UX?

I grew up with computers and had a half dozen dumpster-dived desktops in my basement. So, naturally, I did a university degree in Linguistics. After enjoying coding for my senior thesis and being the web developer for some societies in uni and for my own personal sites, I took a Masters in Computational Linguistics, with some UX courses which lead through a long, tangled route to me working as a front end developer for a couple of years in New York and San Francisco.

When I started the User Is Drunk, I mainly had front end experience, not UX, and was working as a freelancer on a project with the MIT Media Lab as a designer and developer. There’s no easy path that shows how I got from A to B, and I’m not entirely sure where B is, anyway.

So, how did you decide to start getting drunk and testing people’s websites for them?

Personal experience. Basically, I had come back from a nice night (I assume, I’ve since forgotten. I think it was a date.) and my friend asked me to jump on Google Hangouts and review his site for him. The feedback was brutally honest, and kind of useful because of that, and I remember saying “I should make a thing out of this.”

Drunk advice is different than normal advice; it’s not caged, it’s emotional bull**** but not normally buzzword bull****, and it is not good at error recognition or correction at all. It’s niche. And niche things are good.

I let the idea stew for a couple of months, and then, at a hackathon, decided to just run with it one day. The rest is history – it went viral, and there I was, reviewing people’s sites for money.

When and where have you primarily done this?

I did the majority of the reviews while traveling with Hacker Paradise through in Bali and Thailand. But I’ve done reviews all over the world – I’m a digital nomad, so it’s anyone’s guess where I am going to be at any given moment. I remember doing reviews in Tokyo, Berlin, Boston…

I don’t drink alone. That’s a quick way to hate yourself. So, normally, I invite some friends out for some drinks, and then slip away for twenty minutes, and come back and buy everyone a round. It seems to work pretty well. I’ve gotten better at planning to do little work the next day, too.

What do you do when you aren’t critiquing people’s websites?

Live my life. Recently, that means I run a company I founded – maintainer.io – which helps people maintain their open source software, and consults with businesses on their open source strategy. I am a community manager as well as a developer, so this came out of that, realizing that a lot of what maintainers do can be done as a service.

Sometimes I debate getting a lot of buzz words I’ve used to describe my work printed on hats, and hanging them all on my wall.

What’s your approach — do you wing it or are you usually looking at something specific?

I wing it. Sometimes clients have questions for me, but mostly I just go. It’s very hard to plan drunk. There have been many times where I’ve failed to turn on my microphone, for instance, so I am largely better off just clicking around and following my gut.

How do you think drinking allows you to look at websites differently? How do you think web designers benefit from getting a drunk user to look at their site from a UX perspective?

Basically, it means that I am honest, or at least that there is no filter. There’s what alcohol does; it inhibits your own ability to self-reflect and realize what you are saying and doing. This kind of reaction can’t be faked, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve never pretended to be drunk (the other reason being because that just wouldn’t be right).

The advice or complaints you give while drunk haven’t gone through some review board, haven’t been cleaned up – it’s what me, a real person, actually thinks about your site at a given time. That’s invaluable.

Couldn’t just anyone get drunk and click through their own website?

Sure. But they don’t have the experience I do, and they may not be used to developing and designing websites. Also, at this point, I’m the most experienced drunk UX auditor in the world. I think that counts for something. But if you’re up for it, go have a good time. Drink responsibly.

What are the top 3 worst things websites tend to do in the eyes of an inebriated user?

Dark UX patterns are very, very clear when you’re drunk. A lot of websites are jerks – no, I don’t want to sign up for your newsletter. No, I don’t want this pop-up to happen every time.

Another major thing would be too much text. Reading walls of texts isn’t really my thing, and probably isn’t other people’s either. On the other hand, Pam, the mom from The User Is My Mom, loves reading walls of texts. She has a longer attention span. Age matters.

The final worst thing would be red and green colors everywhere. I’m a bit colorblind; not horribly, but if you point to a cardinal in a Christmas tree, it’ll take me a while to find it. A lot of sites don’t cater to people with this disability, although it is fairly common. That gets annoying, fast.

Have you ever drunk tested in different browsers or devices? Do you think there would be any value in testing responsive design under the influence?

I’ve done a few apps, and a few private sessions. There is some value, there. Frankly, though, I’m not an app developer, and I’ve always felt that my advice on websites is more pertinent. There is definitely value in responsive design for drunk people. You have no idea where your users will be.

How did people respond to the results? Do a lot of people change their web design after your reviews?

It’s all across the board. I’ve gotten a few people who were full of praise, and changed a lot of things, working my tips into their sites. I’ve had people change their onboarding process after, especially.

I’ve also had a fair amount of people who never got back to me. Those are not fun. Drunk user testing is very hard to standardize – sometimes I’m nice, sometimes I’m not. That’s how it goes.

What’s your drink of choice?

Uisge beatha. Talisker, 12 year, or a Laphroaig, quarter-cask. But normally it’s just a local beer. I’ve gone off stouts, wheat beers, and red wine with cigars as a result of some bad nights. That’s OK with me.

What advice do you have for designers who want to cater to the user experience, whether those users are drunk or sober?

Get on Twitter and Designer News. This is the golden age of learning – never stop.

And please don’t use red and green colors too much.

Any last thoughts you’d like to add?

While the User is Drunk is fun and stupid, it’s also fun and stupid. This is not my main job, at all. Currently, I’m working on consulting for companies wishing to do better open source, and helping individual coders and teams who have too much code to maintain – check out my business at maintainer.io.

I say this because I think a lot of people are under the illusion I only do the User Is Drunk, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I limit my reviews to around once a month now. Livers can’t be fixed by resetting the router. Drink responsibly, folks.